January 12-17, 2026
Thank you for joining us for Week 3 of Salem Witch Trials Daily! This week we moved from the broad context of Salem Village’s divisions into the specific legal and governmental chaos that made the witch trials possible. We explored why Massachusetts couldn’t hold trials for months, examined the influential Mather family, investigated the strange afflictions that sparked the panic, and analyzed what counted as evidence in 1692 courts. The powder keg isn’t just packed anymore, the fuse is lit.
This Week’s Content
Daily Videos (Salem Witch Trials Daily YouTube Playlist)
- January 12: The Old Charter Saga
- January 13: New Charter
- January 14: The Mathers
- January 15: The Afflictions of the Goodwin Children
- January 16: Causes of Affliction
- January 17: Testimony as Evidence
Weekly Podcast The Thing About Salem: “The Thing About 1692”
Standard Edition Course Workbook:
Youth Edition Course Workbook:
The Charter Crisis: Why Salem Had to Wait
When the afflictions began in mid-January 1692, Massachusetts was in legal limbo. The jails were filling with accused witches, but no trials could be held. Understanding why requires understanding Massachusetts’s constitutional crisis.
Massachusetts received its original charter from King Charles I in 1629, giving the colony remarkable freedom to govern itself. The Court of Assistants served as the highest court for capital cases like witchcraft. Massachusetts passed its first comprehensive law code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, in 1641, updated in 1648.
But in 1684, King Charles II revoked the charter. Massachusetts had broken English trade laws and engaged in severe religious oppression, banishing dissenters and executing Quakers. As author Katherine Howe described it to us on The Thing About Witch Hunts, the colonists had been “very, very naughty” in the eyes of the crown.
In 1686, King James II established the Dominion of New England, a massive supercolony stretching from New Jersey to Nova Scotia, with Sir Edmund Andros as governor. The Puritans despised Andros. He brought toleration of other Protestant denominations, which the Puritans saw as corrupting their godly commonwealth. This loss of self-governance created the legal limbo and political instability that contributed to the Salem Witch Trials.
When William III and Mary II deposed King James II in November 1688, news took months to reach Massachusetts. On April 18, 1689, Bostonians imprisoned Andros and sent him back to England. Massachusetts returned to interim government, governing off of nothing and not knowing how the king would react.
Increase Mather went to England to negotiate for a new charter, and it was finally issued October 7, 1691, but word didn’t arrive in Massachusetts until late January 1692. On February 8, the details made it clear that courts should not proceed with trials until the new government was installed. This was February 1692. Accusations and arrests of alleged witches were already happening, but trials had to wait.
On May 14, 1692, the charter finally arrived with the new appointed governor, Sir William Phips. This new charter forced toleration of other Protestant faiths and allowed any adult male property owner to vote. Previously, you had to be a member of the Puritan Church. The charter voided all existing laws, which had to be rewritten.
Courts also had to be reestablished. New courts were not established by new legislature until November 1692. Meanwhile, jails overflowed.
On May 27, Governor Phips created an emergency solution: the Court of Oyer and Terminer (to hear and determine). This special court would hear the backlog of witchcraft cases. The court had nine judges appointed by Phips, along with juries selected from county freemen.
On June 2, Bridget Bishop was tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. She was presumed guilty from the moment she entered the courtroom. Eight days later, on June 10, Bridget Bishop was hanged, becoming the first execution of the Salem Witch Trials.The new legislature didn’t even meet until June 8. The Court of Oyer and Terminer met monthly from June through September, hearing 27 cases of witchcraft and producing 27 convictions, a 100% conviction rate. In October, Governor Phips disbanded the court, bringing the emergency trials to an end.
On November 25, legislators finally created the permanent court system. The Court of Assistants was replaced by a Superior Court of Judicature. William Stoughton became chief justice again, with Samuel Sewall, Waitstill Winthrop, and John Richards were also reappointed.
From January through May 1693, this new court saw 50 witchcraft trials. Three convictions occurred, all women who had confessed: Elizabeth Johnson Jr., Sarah Wardwell, and Mary Post. This puts the lie to the myth that confessing would save your life. In January 1693, Chief Justice Stoughton put these women on a death warrant with eight people scheduled for execution February 1. On January 31, Governor Phips issued a reprieve, declaring no one else would be executed for witchcraft.
The Mather Dynasty: Three Generations of Influence
Understanding the Salem Witch Trials requires understanding the Mather family, whose influence shaped colonial Massachusetts for three generations.
Richard Mather was born in England in 1596. After being suspended from preaching for his Puritan teachings, he sailed for Massachusetts in 1635, establishing a church in Dorchester in 1636. In 1646, he helped write the Cambridge Platform, the rules guiding the Puritan Church in New England. He died April 22, 1669.
Increase Mather was born June 21, 1639. He attended Harvard at age 12, then Trinity College in Dublin. He married Maria Cotton, daughter of influential minister John Cotton. Increase became minister of the North Church in Boston and served as Harvard president from 1685 to 1701. In 1684, he wrote Illustrious Providences, compiling tales of wonders, witchcraft, and portents. He negotiated Massachusetts’s controversial 1691 charter.
In October 1692, Increase published Cases of Conscience, arguing that the devil could appear as an angel of light to frame innocent people, which ultimately helped delegitimize spectral evidence. He wrote, “it were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.” This book helped lead to the end of the Salem Witch Trials. Increase died August 23, 1723.
Cotton Mather was born February 12, 1663, grandson of revered Richard Mather and John Cotton. He enrolled in Harvard at age 11 and a half, graduating in 1678. He was ordained in 1685 and ministered in his father’s North Church. Cotton married Abigail Phillips in 1686 and they had eight children.
In 1689, he published Memorable Providences, the only account of Goody Glover’s 1688 witchcraft trial in Boston. It described in great detail the afflictions experienced by the Goodwin children. This book would prove enormously consequential. By the time the Salem afflictions started in 1692, villagers were familiar with the case through Cotton’s popular book. Everybody in Salem was familiar with what happened to the Goodwin children and how to behave when afflicted.
Although Cotton occasionally urged exquisite caution in letters to judges, he also called for speedy and vigorous prosecutions. Cotton published the official defense of the trials, Wonders of the Invisible World, in 1692. One of New England’s leading intellectuals, he published 388 books and pamphlets covering a wide range of topics. In 1721, Cotton advocated for smallpox inoculation in Boston, which proved very controversial. He died February 13, 1728. Only two of his many children survived him.
The Goodwin Afflictions: Setting the Script
In Reverend Samuel Parris’s home, his 9-year-old daughter Betty and 11-year-old niece Abigail Williams fell into violent, unexplained fits starting in mid-January 1692. Their behaviors eerily matched the Boston case from 1688, when four of John Goodwin’s children claimed to be afflicted by alleged witch Goody Glover.
The Goodwin children’s symptoms were extreme and varied. Their tongues were drawn down their throats or pulled out to prodigious lengths. Their jaws were forced out of joint. They were sometimes bent neck and heels together. They became deaf, dumb, or blind, often all at once. They shrieked that invisible knives were cutting them and invisible cudgels were beating them. Though no one could see these weapons, red streaks and marks appeared on their bodies. Most tellingly, they suffered intolerable anguish when ordered to clean a dirty table but could handle a clean table with no problem. Yet despite daytime torments, they ate and slept well each night.
In Salem, Betty and Abigail displayed remarkably similar afflictions. Town of Beverly Minister John Hale wrote that the Salem afflicted “were in all things afflicted as bad as John Goodwin’s children at Boston in the year 1689.”
Consciously or subconsciously, the afflicted people of Salem Village behaved in ways that conformed with expectations. The Goodwin case, published by Cotton Mather essentially taught New England what being afflicted was supposed to look like: specific physical contortions, the timing of attacks, the resistance to prayer, the invisible torments. Even if not everyone had read the account themselves, they heard it through hearsay. The Goodwin children had shown New England what witchcraft looked like, and Salem followed the pattern precisely, a pattern that had already hanged a witch.
What Caused the Afflictions?
Physicians were consulted from the beginning, but unable to make clinical diagnoses. One finally said Betty Parris and Abigail Williams were under “an evil hand,”.
Silver bullet explanations attempt to oversimplify the complex reality of the Salem Witch Trials into a single tidy cause. The trials were actually the result of many overlapping factors.
Ergot poisoning is the most frequently cited theory, suggesting the afflicted girls ate rye bread contaminated with ergot fungus, causing hallucinations. Experts describe this theory as thoroughly debunked because the symptoms did not match ergotism, which includes gangrene, diarrhea, and vomiting. The afflictions switched off and on depending upon circumstances. The afflicted would be well one moment, then take ill when in the presence of a suspected witch. Convulsive ergotism does not ebb and flow this way. This theory was rebutted by experts the same year it was proposed in 1976 and again in 1983.
Other medical theories include Lyme disease, epilepsy, meningitis, and encephalitis. Beverly Minister John Hale specifically said the afflictions did not match epilepsy. Some physiological explanations may hold water for some afflicted people. Some may have experienced trauma or stress-based disorders like PTSD and conversion disorder. Mass psychogenic illness remains a possible explanation for how the affliction seemed to spread virally from Betty and Abigail to Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam Jr., Mary Walcott, and dozens more people.
Sleep paralysis may also have played a role. Numerous accusers reported spectral witches coming into their room at night and pinning them to their beds, rendering them speechless but fully aware. These stories reflect the condition of sleep paralysis.
One very real non-medical explanation is the possibility of outright fraud, lies, and deceit. Several witnesses reported seeing afflicted persons faking injury or catching them in boldfaced lies.
But why were the afflicted lying and what did they stand to gain? Were they being fed names by others? Did Ann Putnam Senior coach her daughter Ann Jr. to accuse Rebecca Nurse?
We may never know what motivated the afflicted. But it is not as important to identify the afflictions, as it is to understand how people reacted. What moved Joseph Hutchinson, Thomas Preston and Thomas and Edward Putnam to swear out complaints against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba? Why did they later defend some of the accused? Why was Rebecca Nurse named as a witch? These are the important questions.
Evidence in the Salem Courts
Before conviction came suspicion, and in Salem, suspicion from anybody was enough to warrant an arrest for witchcraft. Why did magistrates issue warrants for the arrest of Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne on February 29, 1692? The four men who filed the complaint provided eyewitness testimony to what they had observed in the afflicted girls.
After these first three suspects were arrested, they were subjected to physical searches for witch teats or marks. This was key evidence used in trials of several accused. The three women also faced verbal examination by magistrates, featuring leading questions designed to draw out confessions. Tituba did finally confess, implicating Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and seven unidentified people.
Confessions were the gold standard of evidence because it was proof from the witch’s own mouth. During the Salem Witch Trials, at least 54 people confessed. Contrary to belief, confessors were not necessarily spared. Instead, they were kept alive long enough to testify against others, before they were tried and condemned. In September 1692, Samuel Wardwell who had confessed before recanting, was executed.
Witness testimony included spectral visions and strange encounters. William Allen said he saw “a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground, so that going up to it, the said beast vanished away, and in the said place, start up two or three women and flew from me, not after the manner of other women, but swiftly vanished away out of our sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba.”
Spectral evidence, though controversial, was critical to convictions. The afflicted told many stories about attacks by the spectral forms of witches, the ghostly part that could leave the body to do the devil’s bidding. Chaining suspects in jail was said to prevent their specters from roaming. Another form of spectral testimony involved tales of the ghosts visiting the afflicted to accuse their murderers.
The afflicted produced artifacts from spectral assaults, such as pins and needles, a broken knife, and even a wheelband. They also showed bite marks and other wounds supposedly inflicted by witch specters. Some of the accused were said to have cuts in their clothing where they were wounded while in spectral form.
Magistrates heard from many people whose friends or acquaintances had witnessed events, or maybe just heard something in the rumor mill. Conjecture and hearsay were rampant. Much of the witness testimony was about old fights, ancient grudges, and long ago disputes in which harsh words were exchanged. Such words which in hindsight were deemed to be curses. Some of these grudges went back decades.
This Week’s Podcast: The Thing About 1692
The Thing About Salem: “Meanwhile in the rest of the world in 1692”
Understanding the Salem Witch Trials requires understanding the world context of 1692. This was the Early Modern Period, a time of transition and colonization when exploration and scientific discovery opened up a wider world. Unfortunately, this gave rise to much colonization and religious imperialism. By 1692, 200 years after Columbus sailed to the Americas, Europeans had colonized much of North and South America and were fighting over other people’s homelands, forcing religious conversions, and engaging in widespread ethnic cleansing.
In New England in 1692, the English were at war with the French and the Wabanaki Confederacy, an alliance of five Native American nations. The English fought King William’s War in northern New England, chiefly in Maine and New Hampshire, from 1688 to 1697. On January 24, 1692, French and Wabanaki forces raided York, Maine, killing some 100 English colonists and taking another 80 captive. York’s minister, Shubael Dummer, was killed and mutilated. Captain John Flood was unable to bring his militia force up from Portsmouth in time to intervene. He was then accused of witchcraft in May, a reflection of frustration with the losses suffered in the war.
New Englanders also had to contend with piracy. 1692 fell right in the middle of the Golden Age of Piracy, when characters like Captain William Kidd plied New England waters.
In Old England, the English were fighting the Nine Years War against France while also contending with Jacobites in Scotland and Ireland who wanted the line of King James II restored to the throne. In Scotland, the Jacobite Rising of 1689 continued into February 1692, when soldiers under Captain Robert Campbell attacked the MacDonald clan in Glencoe, Scotland, massacring 38 and forcing more than 40 others to retreat into the mountains in winter, where they succumbed to the elements.
Despite continuous warfare, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were underway. Sir Isaac Newton published his theory of gravitation and laws of motion in his 1687 masterpiece, Principia. For many, this publication marks the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. John Locke published three masterworks between 1689 and 1690: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Robert Boyle, whose name you might recognize from Boyle’s Law, died on December 31, 1691.
London, which had been obliterated by plague and fire in 1665 and 1666, was still rebuilding in 1692, but theatres were thriving. The great English composer Henry Purcell first presented his semi-opera The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on May 2, 1692. This was the same day that minister George Burroughs was arrested for witchcraft in Maine and transported to Salem.
Far south of New England but closely connected by trade, Jamaica was devastated by a massive earthquake in June 1692. This powerful tremor and the tsunami it generated sank much of the island below sea level and killed an estimated 2,000 people. Another 3,000 people soon died of injury or disease. This earthquake hit the same day Bridget Jones was tried, June 8th.
Also the same week In 1692, New Spain was rocked by the Mexico City Corn Riots. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, Spain was reconquering the Pueblo nations, which had forced the Spanish out in 1680.
Elsewhere, the Sun King, Louis XIV, continued to reign in France. He would spend more than 72 years as monarch, the longest recorded rule of any monarch in history. In China, the Kangxi Emperor was in the middle of a long reign of 61 years. In 1692, he signed an edict of toleration of Christians. In India, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was in the 34th of 48 years in power. During his reign, India moved past China to become the world’s largest economy.
The Salem Witch Trials occurred in a period of great upheaval when the very laws of the universe were being questioned and kingdoms were consolidating into nations with greater centralized power. Witch trials were on their way out due to greater judicial skepticism and the centralization of judicial systems. However, 1692 was not the end of witchcraft accusations and trials.
Conclusion
Week 3 reveals the legal infrastructure that enabled the witch trials. Massachusetts’s charter crisis created a legal vacuum where emergency courts operated without proper oversight. The Mather family’s three generations of influence shaped colonial thinking about witchcraft and evidence. Cotton Mather’s book about the Goodwin children provided a script that Salem’s afflicted followed precisely. Once the afflictions began, a wide array of “evidence,” from spectral visions to ancient grudges to witch’s marks, would be admitted in court to secure convictions.
The afflictions may have had medical, psychological, or fraudulent causes, but the real question isn’t what caused the afflicted to behave strangely. Why did adults in positions of power choose to respond by arresting, trying, and executing their neighbor?
Where We Are in the Timeline
Week 3 of ~75 weeks | ~4% Complete | January 2026 – May 2027
January 12 through 17, 1692. The legal system is in limbo, the afflictions follow a proven script, and evidence standards are dangerously low. Next week, the afflictions intensify and spread.
Key People to Remember
- Increase Mather negotiated the controversial 1691 charter and later published Cases of Conscience against spectral evidence
- Cotton Mather wrote Memorable Providences about the Goodwin children, providing the script Salem would follow
- Richard Mather helped write the Cambridge Platform defining Puritan church governance
- Sir William Phips arrived as new governor in May 1692 and created the Court of Oyer and Terminer
- William Stoughton served as chief justice of both the Court of Oyer and Terminer and the Superior Court of Judicature
- Bridget Bishop was the first person tried and executed (June 10, 1692)
- The Goodwin children exhibited afflictions in 1688 that became the template for Salem
Key Terms
Charter was the legal document authorizing Massachusetts to govern itself
Court of Oyer and Terminer was the emergency court created by Sir Phips to process the witchcraft cases
Superior Court of Judicature was the permanent court system established November 1692
Spectral Evidence was testimony about what a person’s spirit allegedly did
Witch’s Mark or Teat was a mark supposedly left by the devil on a witch’s body for familiars to suckle
Confession was the gold standard of evidence, though it didn’t save the confessor
Legal Limbo was the period from 1684 to 1692 when Massachusetts lacked a valid charter
Dominion of New England was the supercolony established by King James II in 1686
Toleration was the policy forcing Puritans to accept other Protestant denominations
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources: John Hale, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=evans;cc=evans;rgn=main;view=text;idno=N00872.0001.001
The Charter of Massachusetts Bay (1629) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp
The Charter of Massachusetts Bay (1691) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass07.asp
Massachusetts Body of Liberties
A full account of the late dreadful earth-quake at Port-Royal in Jamaica (1692) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/B03385.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext
People Accused of Witchcraft in 1692 http://www.17thc.us/primarysources/accused.php
Secondary Sources: Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience https://bookshop.org/a/90227/9780190627805
Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt https://bookshop.org/a/90227/9781107689619
Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege https://bookshop.org/a/90227/9781589791329
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 https://bookshop.org/a/90227/9780375706905
Riot in Mexico City: a challenge to the colonial order? https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926815000279
Links: Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub https://aboutsalem.com/salem-witch-trials-daily/
Week 2 Course Work
Week 1 Course Work https://aboutsalem.com/salem-witch-trials-daily-course-week-1-setting-the-stage-for-salem/
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